1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to event management, and more particularly, to an improved solution for managing events using a plurality of stateless event servers.
2. Background Art
An event management solution (EMS) provides information (data) that allows operations staff to manage an information technology (IT) environment of one or more customers. In particular, the events and corresponding data generated within the IT environment can be monitored by the EMS to ensure that the various systems in the IT environment operate efficiently and effectively. This enables the EMS to provide the operations staff with timely warning of impending problems, notification of failing processes, identification of problem areas in a system, and the like. Further, the EMS may be able to automatically fix one or more problems before service availability for the IT environment falls below acceptable levels.
An EMS acts as an intermediary between a managed IT environment and one or more event consumers (e.g., management applications). In particular, the managed IT environment will include one or more event sources (e.g., managed objects) that produce events. An “event” comprises an individual data entity corresponding to some information communicated from an event source to an event consumer, i.e., from the managed environment to the management application. The event and its corresponding event data are sent to the EMS, from which the events are distributed to one or more interested event consumers. Further, the EMS can store the event data for later processing and/or access by an event consumer. In any event, the event consumer processes the event data. For example, an event consumer can comprise a server application which registers for, receives, and processes event data.
Due to the nature of customers, it is desirable that an event management solution perform without disruptions under high demand situations. Further, customers have requirements that are continually expanding and/or contracting. To this extent, the event management solution should be both reliable and scalable to readily meet a customer's needs.
However, current event management solutions either do not provide sufficient reliability or rely on expensive additional hardware and complicated solutions in order to provide the desired reliability. In the latter case, the solutions are not readily scalable due to the complex and expensive implementation. For example, some event management solutions require additional hardware such as a High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP) environment, a hardware cluster, or the like. In these solutions, additional software may also be required to handle a server failure, such as standby backup systems, event forwarding rules from a primary server to a secondary server, etc. Despite this, when a disruption occurs, many of these solutions cannot guarantee that there will be no down time. In order to provide such a guarantee, some event management solutions incorporate systems that are more difficult and costly to maintain, deploy, and operate. Further, these systems often do not allow the solution to be readily scaled to meet the demands of a changing IT environment.
Additionally, many event management solutions can only be configured at the time that they are deployed (implemented). As a result, these solutions must be set up so that they are capable of processing peak demand situations, thereby increasing the cost of the solution. However, these processing capabilities exceed the requirements for the majority of the operating time. Further, when such a solution incorporates a backup system, the cost to scale up the system is substantially higher for the customer since the backup system should be upgraded as well.
In light of these limitations, current solutions generally do not completely meet the availability and/or scalability requirements for many customers. As a result, a need exists for an improved solution for managing events. In particular, a need exists for a method, system and program product that manages events using a plurality of stateless event servers.